


Threads in a Tapestry

by cosmic_llin



Category: The Worst Witch (TV 2017)
Genre: Episode Tag, F/F, Fluff, Sappy, Teaching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-29
Updated: 2018-03-29
Packaged: 2019-04-14 14:39:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14138136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmic_llin/pseuds/cosmic_llin
Summary: Hecate and Ada, and the school at night.Set soon after the events of All Hallow's Eve/The Big Freeze.





	Threads in a Tapestry

For a while, neither of them slept much.

One night, Hecate gasped awake from a nightmare of Ada entombed in ice and found the real Ada, warm and safe, sitting beside her in bed reading by the glow of a small illumination spell.

Ada’s hand wrapped around hers and she held on tight for a few moments, until her heart slowed a little.

‘All right?’ Ada asked.

Hecate nodded. ‘Have you slept at all yet tonight?’

Ada shrugged. ‘Every time I close my eyes...’

‘I know. I know.’

They looked at each other for a moment. Then Ada took a deep breath in and out, set her mouth in a firm line, and slid out of the bed.

‘Let’s go for a walk,’ she said.

Hecate could have pointed out that it was the middle of the night, that there was a chill in the air, that they both had to work in the morning. But a walk actually sounded like a good idea.

She pulled on her robe and followed Ada out of the room.

Hecate didn’t walk much, usually. The corridors were always so busy, so narrow and full of chattering motion. Better to transfer from one place to another, sidestep the noise and unpredictability. But she liked it like this.

The castle was quiet, but it wasn’t the ominous, icy silence of that horrible day. It was the silence of young witches who had worked hard and were now sleeping well. Hecate and Ada walked through the moonlit school, their footsteps soft on stone, the quiet punctuated by the occasional sound of an owl or a bat outside, or a bed creaking as one of the girls turned over in her sleep. Every now and then a cat passed by them on its own inscrutable business.

(The cats had known to leave the castle when the founding stone failed, and after it was reignited they had all come back, slinking into their cosy corners as if they had never been gone. Hecate usually gave Morgana her space, but that night she had scooped her up and held her close for as long as she would peacefully tolerate.)

They walked past all the bedrooms, worked their way downward, and came to a stop at the foot of the main staircase. Ada sat down on the bottom step, and Hecate joined her.

‘To think that we came so close to losing it all...’ said Ada.

Hecate linked their fingers together. ‘But we didn’t,’ she said.

‘Mmmm,’ agreed Ada, leaning against her.

Hecate still remembered the first time she’d been in this spot, the day she’d come to apply for her job. Miss Bat had greeted her warmly at the bottom of the stairs and led her up to the office, where Ada’s mother had been waiting to interview her. She’d been nervous that day. She’d wanted it so badly. She’d walked down the stairs again on the way out and dared to imagine herself here, and it had all come true. Cackle’s had been her home now for almost thirty years, so familiar now that she almost forgot to look at it. She looked now, noticing every detail, every scuffed flagstone, every picture on the walls.

Ada was gazing out into the hallway, remembering things of her own. ‘Let’s go to the roof,’ she said. ‘I’d like to look at it all from there.’

The roof was a long way up.

Hecate remembered climbing, step by dreadful step, to the top of the tallest tower, feeling the magic already beginning to freeze in her veins, fighting it as hard as she could, knowing that she was only forcing herself onward to give it all up anyway.

‘Why don’t I transfer us there?’ she suggested.

Ada nodded, and Hecate pulled the magic around them. When they arrived on the roof she smiled - even the everyday spells felt so precious now, knowing how close she had been to losing them. She could barely manage to maintain her serious demeanour in class when she demonstrated a potion to the girls, could hardly hide the joy that surged through her as she weighed out the ingredients and stirred them carefully in.

The moon was sinking and the horizon was tinged with light. Ada slipped an arm around Hecate’s waist.

‘When I inherited the school,’ she said, ‘I never could have imagined… I thought I was prepared for how much of a responsibility it was, how much it would change me. How much I would love every single one of our students.’

She looked out at the brightening morning.

‘We’ve done all right, haven’t we?’ she said. ‘We’ve made something to be proud of.’

‘You have,’ Hecate agreed.

Ada smiled. ‘You know this school is every bit as much yours as it is mine,’ she said. ‘Becoming headmistress was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done, and without all the help you gave me then, and have given me since... well, Cackle’s might have been a very different place. The school may carry my name, but it would fall apart without you.’

‘Without both of us.’

It wasn’t anything they hadn’t talked about many times before - Ada was the sentimental sort and free with affection and compliments - but it was nice to hear it now, after everything that had happened.

They were doing something good. It was all of it worth something.

‘I wonder how many hundreds of girls have passed through here since we began?’ Ada mused. ‘And now they’re all out there, making their way in the world, with the things we taught them.’

‘And there’ll be hundreds more yet,’ said Hecate.

It was a comfortable thought - the future stretching ahead of them, full of the minutes and hours and weeks and years that made up the pattern of the school’s life, threads in a tapestry.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever felt more grateful for anything in my life,’ said Ada.

She shivered in the chill, and Hecate cast a warming spell that settled like a blanket over their shoulders. They stood with their arms around each other and watched the golden light spread across the sky until the sun climbed into view, lighting up the grounds below them.

‘We’d better go in,’ said Ada. ‘Breakfast will be starting soon. Busy day ahead.’

Another busy day at Cackle’s. Lessons to teach, homework to mark, potion to scrape off the walls after the inevitable explosions.

Hecate smiled. ‘I wouldn’t have it any other way.’


End file.
